Progressive Democrats are, by definition, capitalists, not socialists btw.
voaw
I have had a terrible experience with kobo btw. $450 for a stupid ereader that, three years later, is glitchy and slow af, doesnt sync to my phone or ipad kobo app if i want to read on those, does not hold a charge, and a lot of ebooks I bought when I first got my kobo no longer work (either some kind of formatting error or just blank pages)! Also, they literally have ZERO customer service except for a team of like two Indian people who will give you the runaround for days. Kobo is an absolute scam. I use my ipad mini with the PocketBook app (there are plenty of others that are just as good) and just download ebooks for free from Anna’s Archive or get from my libraries on libby.
My argument is that Israel and the US are inextricably linked in a way that #1. Makes it impossible for Israel to commit genocide without the decades long financial, political, and weapons support provided by the US and #2. Makes it impossible for Israel to do anything militarily without at least some US involvement. US companies set up bases on Cypress from which they flew spy planes over Gaza. US companies like Palantir have been surveilling Gaza for years, providing information to the US and Israel which allows them to target civilians so easily. The US GHF (staffed by Americans, many of which come from an islamophobic biker gang*) took over administering aid from UNWRA in Gaza, after which GHF mercenaries terrorized and murdered countless starving Palestinians seeking aid at only a handful of aid distribution sites. Americans (and many Europeans) have joined the IDF and are on active duty in Occupied Palestine. The Biden administration broke US law to continue to provide military aid to Israel despite the US govt's conclusion that Israel was withholding aid from Palestinian civilians**. The Uyghur genocide claim is not based in reality and was a right-wing conspiracy theory put forth by a German Christian nationalist named Adrian Zenz that Trump 1.0 and Biden seized on to further imperialist propaganda against China. There was a real life violent separatist movement in Xinjiang called East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM) that was affiliated with Al-Qaeda that was doing violent terrorist attacks in China. China cracking down on a violent terrorist group is not equal to genocide***.
Again it's not my opinion. What you call my "opinion" is based on unbiased sources that are not propagated by billionaire-funded mainstream imperialist propaganda. If you want more sources, I'd be happy to provide them.
*** https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352372325_Playing_Genocide_Politics_The_Zenz-Xinjiang_Case
And as for a vanguard communist party coalescing, don't worry about that. DSA, which is democratic socialist not communist (and likely would never be able to fill the shoes of a vanguard party), is super popular now, and socialism and communism in general are gaining popularity among younger people. The more people who are interested in and study socialism and communism and get organized and involved, the likelier we are going to have more and more people willing to come together and form a competent party. Socialism for All (S4A), a youtube channel that publishing educational videos for people wanting to learn Marxist theory and analysis of current events, has seen exponential growth in subscriptions and engagement in the past ten years, as another example.


Our current bourgeois parties would certainly not have any part in organizing the working class or creating a vanguard party. It is up to the people to organize/be organized in a mass movement outside of a political party that is controlled by and beholden to the rich guys in power. There are third parties in existence now (like the Green Party, Peace & Freedom Party in California, and DSA, if it ever decouples from the Democratic Party) that can help organize workers into a mass movement to support a future vanguard party and worker revolution. But it could also be a mass movement akin to what we saw in Minneapolis, people on the ground from a bunch of different groups (and people from no groups) coming together to oppose ICE. This is all usually spurred on by a sheer drop in living conditions, like we are witnessing right now, and which will only be exacerbated by the growing AI data center trend, which will destabilize water supplies, cause huge electrical service disruptions, and which may cause pollution on a scale we have not experienced in our lifetimes.
Not sure what this AI slop is lol, but this is definitely not what I'm talking about. I recommend reading "How Marxism Works" by Chris Harman if you want to learn more to get a better idea of what I'm talking about. You can read it for free at this link: https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1979/marxism/
You're missing the whole part about the revolution. It's not a revolution brought about by voting or legislation. And it's also not about left vs. right. It's about the majority of people, the working class (farmers, factory workers, delivery drivers, teachers, healthcare workers, anyone who works for a wage and has a boss over them but also including small business owners in a lot of cases), engaging in a mass labor movement against the ruling class (bosses, large business owners, billionaires) in order to provide enough support to the vanguard party (see below) to take power and protect the movement/overwhelm the most likely violent reaction of the minority, wealthy, militaristic ruling class. This is all to achieve a government for the people by the people (to eradicate things like homelessness, mass job layoffs, and exorbitant home, food, and healthcare prices). We want a govt without the influence of billionaires, mega corporations, and the bourgeois political parties (like the Democrats & the Republicans).
Vanguard party (defined by ProleWiki):
The vanguard party, also called the vanguard, is the political party that is the most able to organize the proletariat and other popular classes (such as the peasantry) into a revolutionary party, and thus bring socialism to their country. The vanguard plays an important role in instilling revolutionary class consciousness amongst the proletariat and plays a critical role in the dictatorship of the proletariat in consolidating ties with the proletariat of other nations and maintaining the alliance of the workers and peasants. The vanguard is not a name a party gives themselves or gets bestowed upon them. A party becomes the vanguard when it proves to be the most capable at organizing the proletariat and achieving results. This also means the status of the vanguard can be lost if the party suddenly stops achieving results, or another party achieves even better results towards socialism.
That's cool but you're coming from a very individualistic perspective. Any kind of revolution would be futile without the support of a mass labor movement that encourages workers to stand up for themselves and organize, something which needs to be the left's main objective before we can even think of revolution. A future disciplined vanguard party will serve the role you are talking about. But without a mass movement, any revolution would be crushed by the overwhelming power of the capitalist police state.
All of these points are making the assumption that the system we currently have is just hunky dorey. Millions die of poverty and treatable illnesses in the US every year. Isn’t that dangerous? We are all subject to the whims of a tiny minority of sadistic billionaire warmongers and business owners who have captured our news and social media and all of the branches of government. Isn’t that dangerous? You’re just going to accept that we live in a country in which there is ever growing homelessness and preventable death because you’re afraid that a people’s revolution might not turn out as expected?
Well one of our opinions is based on reality and one is based on vibes. Seems kinda childish to base your whole political ideology on vibes that are informed by snippets of billionaire-funded mainstream media propaganda. It’s doing more harm than good.
Friend, there are millions of us millennials out here who are in the same boat. You are not alone. I am confident we will, as a generation, improve living conditions for all of us in this lifetime. Capitalism is in its death throes and it sucks that we have to deal with all of the side effects of that, but we have the power to forge new ways of living, and will likely have no choice but to do just that in the near future.
You know the Ukraine war is a US/NATO proxy war to destabilize Russia, right? You know Israel would not exist in its current state without billions of dollars and years of support from the US govt, right? Every conflict on this planet is because of the US and its desperate, bloodthirsty need to ensure every sovereign nation on the globe is in alignment with “US interests” aka upholding US hegemony and the US military industrial complex. Read “Killing Hope” by William Blum if you’re interested in learning more.
The Palestinian genocide is 100% facilitated by the governments of both the US and Israel, and also by most of the governments of Europe and the Middle East and Australia and Canada. But mainly the US and its proxy in the ME Israel!
Y’all need to learn the definition of genocide because Russia and China are certainly doing nothing of the sort. There’s a difference between war and genocide, in the case of Russia (which by all estimates has lost a hell of a lot more lives than Ukraine), and there’s a difference between cracking down on foreign-armed separatist terrorists and genocide, in the case of China. It could even be argued that Ukraine was committing genocide against ethnic Russians in the Donbas prior to 2022 as there is ample evidence.
Lastly, all of this is not a matter of “your opinion”. It’s a matter of reality and the degree to which we are able and willing to see that reality by finding accurate information outside of the overwhelming propaganda machine of Western mainstream media.
That’s good. I was inclined to think i got a dud but my experience trying to read my vast purchased kobo library on the kobo app on my iphone, ipad, and boox palma 2 (the app is basically unusable for me and my account now), plus my terrible customer service experiences with kobo, have left me with an overwhelming idea that kobo as a company sucks and their products are inferior to kindle products.